"Answer him, Wendell, answer him!" whispered Ann, excitedly, and before the Attorney-General had bowed himself from the platform, Wendell Phillips had sprung upon the stage and stood facing the audience. There were cries of, "Vote! Vote!"--the mobocrats wanted to cut the matter short. Still others shouted: "Fair play! Let us hear the boy!" The young man stood there, calm, composed--handsome in the strength of youth. He waited until the audience came to him and then he spoke in that dulcet voice--deliberate, measured, faultless--every sentence spaced. The charm of his speech caught the curiosity of the crowd. People did not know whether he was going to sustain the Attorney-General or assail him. From compliments and generalities he moved off into bitter sarcasm. He riddled the cheap wit of his opponent, tore his logic to tatters, and held the pitiful rags of reason up before the audience. There were cries of: "Treason!" "Put him out!" Phillips simply smiled and waited for the frenzy to subside. The speaker who has aroused his hearers into a tumult of either dissent or approbation has won--and Phillips did both. He spoke for thirty minutes and finished in a whirlwind of applause. The Attorney-General had disappeared, and those of his followers who remained were strangely silent. The resolutions were passed in a shout of acclamation. The fame of Wendell Phillips as an orator was made. Father Taylor once said, "If Emerson goes to hell, he will start emigration in that direction." And from the day of that first Faneuil Hall speech Wendell Phillips gradually caused Abolitionism in New England to become respectable. * * * * * Phillips was twenty-seven years old when he gave that first, great speech, and for just twenty-seven years he continued to speak on the subject of slavery. He was an agitator--he was a man who divided men. He supplied courage to the weak, arguments to the many, and sent a chill of hate and fear through the hearts of the enemy. And just here is a good place to say that your radical--your fire-eater, agitator, and revolutionary who dips his pen in aqua fortis, and punctuates with blood--is almost without exception, met socially, a very gentle, modest and suave individual. William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Horace Greeley, Fred. Douglas, George William Curtis, and even John Brown, were all men with low, musical voices and modest ways--men who would not tread on an insect nor harm a toad. When the fight had been won--the Emancipation Proclamation issued--there were still other fights ahead. The habit of Phillips' life had become fixed. He and Ann lived in that plain little home on Exeter Street, and to this home of love he constantly turned for rest and inspiration. At the close of the War he found his fortune much impaired, and he looked to the Lyceum Stage--the one thing for which he was so eminently fitted.